Price It Aggressively And Go For Volume
june 4, 2010 : steve kong : 1 comment(s)
Steve Jobs was giving advice to publishers and said at D8, "The biggest lesson Apple has learned is: Price it aggressively and go for volume. And anytime we haven’t done that, we’ve had more attenuated success."
Oh really?
Where's the $299, aggressively priced Macbook that would sell in droves to compete with notebooks like my el cheapo eMachines? How about aggressively priced "free with contract" iPhones? Go for volume Steve, go for volume.
When has Apple ever priced their own things aggressively?
june 2, 2010 : steve kong : 1 comment(s)
It took AT&T long enough to do this and it is not a surprise that it is happening: the days of unlimited cellular data are about to end. According to AT&T's press release, on June 7th, you will not be able to get the $30 per month smartphone plan anymore.
The new plans:
- DataPlus: $15 per month for 200MB usage. Overage costs are $15 for each additional 200MB of data.
- DataPro: $25 per month for 2GB usage. Overage costs are $10 for each additional 1GB of data.
Those of us who are still in contract with the $30/month smartphone plan can elect to keep it. After looking at my wife and my usage on att.com (My Accounts -> Bill&Payments -> Billing Reports -> Data Trends), we are definitely not going to stay with the $30/month plan, nor are we going to miss it. Eileen barely breaks 20MB of usage per month. I have not gone over 95MB of usage per month (usually, I float around 50MB). We can half the cost of data per month and still stay within the limits. That is a big win for us. I am sure it will be a big win for a lot of current customers also -- not to mention, this should lower the monthly cost barrier enough to bring in a lot more data customers.
According to Engadget, AT&T will send (free) text alerts when one reachs 65%, 90% and 100% of their data usage limits. It also helps that AT&T has been and will give free access to all of its WiFi hotspots for people with the smartphone plans -- and that a lot of phones include a WiFi radio. And for us Blackberry users, it is great that Blackberries are a bunch more efficient with their bandwidth usage -- especially when compared with the Hummers of smartphones.
I see a bunch of benefits out of this. First, our data costs will be halved -- for our two Blackberries, that will be an annual savings of $360. Second, by putting real limits on data usage, they should be able to free up network bandwidth -- and hopefully there will be less congestion and better quality of service (at least we can hope).
The only people I see losing out are the people who
I am guessing that T-Mobile and Verizon maybe following soon -- and maybe even Sprint? Anyways, what do you think of the new plans?
june 1, 2010 : steve kong : 0 comment(s)
I've been playing with Linux (64-bit releases) on my Athlon 2650e 1.60Ghz, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD notebook recently and here is what I have found. The notebook is a cheap eMachines that runs surprisingly well for what I paid for it and it has a 64-bit processor and also AMD-V for VirtualBox fun.
I've had my ups and downs with recent Ubuntu releases. Usually, 99% of everything would work, but that 1% that didn't would annoy the hell out of me. After using Ubuntu 10.04 for three weeks, I had found that everything actually works! The changes they made to the UI are arguable to whether they are good or not -- the biggest being the move of the window control buttons from the right side to the left side. I can live with that one. Otherwise, the UI work that was done to Ubuntu is fantastic -- thank goodness they finally de-browned the UI. I have nothing against the color brown, but previous Ubuntu UI color schemes were horrendous. The new purple + orange scheme is a lot better. The boot times for Ubuntu 10.04 are really quick (I'd say 10-20 seconds) and the general feel of the OS is snappy (yes, I know "snappy" is not scientific). The "me menu" is a bit bunch of hype and I don't really use it that much.
A week ago, I installed Fedora 13 over my Ubuntu install and ran it for a week. Fedora is a mixed bag for me. I have been a Red Hat guy for a long time and run CentOS on my server and like having the stability of CentOS/RHEL. But, I am finding that I am only a Red Hat guy when it comes to servers. Fedora is cool because it is cutting edge stuff (really? btrfs? cool!) and also because it has some really nice technology in it (I really like the yum-plugin presto that does differential package updates). One of Fedora 13s coolest addition is the automated printer setup. There were other small issues with Fedora 13 (like a Cheese didn't work), but overall everything worked well. The boot times for Fedora 13 are nothing to complain about, but they are slower than Ubuntu 10.04. The general feel of Fedora when using it as a desktop OS is "solid" (which, to me, feels slower than "snappy"). And the UI for Fedora does not wander much from a plain Gnome install -- which can be a great things for some people.
I reimaged my notebook back to Ubuntu 10.04 last night. Not because I don't like Fedora, but because I am using my notebook for regular stuff -- webbrowsing, mail, some programming, editing docs, ssh'ing to different boxes and VirtualBox tomfoolery. Nothing that needs the super cutting edge technology that comes in Fedora. So, having a nicer UI is more important for me than having the bleeding edge features -- sure, it woud be fun to play with btrfs, but on a day-to-day basis is it going to make a difference?
This doesn't mean I'm giving up on Fedora 13, it is just going to live a quiet life in a VM on my Ubuntu install. And I will play with it to see what cool stuff is in there. But, for normal use, I am going to stick with Ubuntu 10.04.
One last thing, since 10.04 is a Long Term Support release, I can customize the hell out of my install and not have to worry about having to upgrade in 12 months. One thing after that one last thing. Ubuntu 10.04 doesn't work on my Toshiba netbook (neither has previous Ubuntu releases). Not sure why they can't get sound working properly.
may 25, 2010 : steve kong : 4 comment(s)
Spammers have a special place in hell. I hope they all burn and burn for a long time.
Anyways, for some reason, I forgot to add the comments RSS feed to my RSS reader. That meant that for a while, the comments weren't being actively checked. The other day when I came to my blog to look for something, I was surprised that there was a boatload of comment spam. I cleaned it up quickly and figured that the spam deterrent for dertyn was a bit underwhelming.
I figured out a different way of trying to block spammers. I pretty am sure the ones that got through were from a human and not a bot (I could be wrong though). The method that I came up with will cause people to use their heads a little more to post a comment -- but it is still better than forcing people to create an account and log in. It also should be good enough to not be brute forced by robots.
Hopefully, it will be enough to keep the spammers at bay. I will trying to figure something else out to better fortify the comments section so that they can stay open. Grab the latest version of dertyn here.
I hate spammers.
april 30, 2010 : steve kong : 1 comment(s)
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Appholes | ||||
| ||||
"It wasn't supposed to be this way. Microsoft was supposed to be the evil one. But now you guys are busting down doors in Palo Alto, while commandant Gates is ridding the world of mosquitoes. What the f**k is going on? It is all mixed up. I don't know which end is up anymore. Black is white. Cats are dogs."